me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach English, I teach school — and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. “The kids have to know how to read and write, don’t they?” “They have to know how to add and subtract, don’t they?” “They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job.”

Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and feel. We were something special, as individuals, as Americans.

This is a commentary page where participants from around Maine put in their complaints about the way the state Party bosses -looking at you, Charlie Webster– blatantly threw out the true counts for the wrong ones they preferred.

One guy commented this would be the end of the Republican Party if they keep this up…

For those who received the press release sent by Mike Quatrano last night, there is an error. Two municipalities are listed with zeros when, in fact, they submitted their numbers. One is Waterville.

XXXXXX was responsible for keeping the spreadsheet. I can tell you, because I saw it, that she had the Waterville numbers. The spreadsheet was copied from her master to a laptop. Somehow, in that process, the numbers changed.

As Charlie Webster stated last night, the official numbers will be placed on the MRP website tomorrow. They will be using XXXXXXX spreadsheet, not the numbers sent in the press release. ”

Looking at both list below is the error rate and if these errors hold true throughout the State Paul will win the straw poll by six votes. Paul would have 2289 to Romneys 2283. How does this sort of thing happen? 15% of Ron Paul votes were not counted…..

In my doctrine as a Christian the woman herself with her man should use or not contraception “according to her faith”, although every conception is a gift.

That said, a person has no natural right to forcibly take the goods of another or the fruits of their labor. The cost for providing contraception will not be free no matter how they word some stupid rule, but the semantic acrobatics in the “compromise” fully expose the semantic bankruptcy of the whole thing. If you want the truth, you can see it. The insurance companies will charge the cost to its customers, even if it’s hidden inside all the rest of its overhead of doing business. Everybody knows this. Everyone.

My right to the free exercise of religion does not give me the “right” to take your money to support my pastor, or my religion, or for any other of my own purposes, no matter how sacred a right it is. Especially if it’s against your own religious doctrine, whatever it is, whether you’re a Catholic, Presbyterian, Jew, Moslem, or atheist, even if your doctrine says women should have a “right” to contraception.

It’s meant to distract from the most outrageous violations of liberty since the Congress ceded a currency monopoly to a cartel of private bankers, the Federal Reserve, ruled by the kings of Wall Street.

The people of America HATED and still HATE the TARP bailouts that continued from the Bush era to the Obama administration, they HATE the secrecy of who got what money, they HATE the coverup on who got what, they HATE the “stimulus” that only stimulated more DEBT, they HATE the deficits that BOTH parties have pushed upwards for decades even though most of them don’t realize the national debt is a theft from the poor and middle class. They HATE the Patriot Act and the NDAA and SOPA and PIPA and ACTA and they HATE the fact the president wants the power to finger anybody he wants to in the whole world for indefinite detention, secretly, and for assassination. And they HATED this nationalization of centralized control over the best medical care system known to the entire world, bar none, despite the warts caused mostly by government meddling itself.

Nationalizing the medical industry and private care is an intrusive assault on privacy, the right recognized, not “given”, in the 4th Amendment, to “BE secure in” our private affairs from intrusive monitoring by government:

4th Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That’s besides the fact that the whole thing violates the 10th amendment that forbids the federal government from any authority that is not expressly given in the Constitution.

Defining state markets as interstate markets for the purpose of micro-managing our lives, as was one of the excuses in a recent debate on CSPAN on the subject, has no boundaries. Every intra-state market in any good or service, under that ridiculously expansive justification, might affect the market in another state, and –hello?– that is good, that is the whole idea!

States and nations should compete with each other, they should not have to follow the same centralized economic planning dictates, a practice which has proven time after time and time again to totally brutalize the poorest of the poor that is cynically used to justify their economic and political oppression!

These guys look just like the other so-called “terrorists” that the FBI recently “stopped” cold, where the FBI provided the encouragement, the plan, the supplies, the means, and then made a big noisy arrest to show they are on the job and that they need more power!

They needed something to support their story that it’s rednecks and country hicks they have to watch out for too!

So how much more operational was this plot than your average FBI sting involving some hapless al-Qaeda fanboy? That’s not really clear. While the group demonstrated an ability to independently manufacture ricin, which is made from widely available castor beans, the criminal complaint begins with a meeting surveilled by an FBI “confidential human source” in March. While the FBI recordings showing the four men expressing an eagerness to kill large numbers of people in pursuit of their political goals will likely preclude any entrapment defense, there’s no way to know from the criminal complaint what level of involvement the FBI’s confidential human source had in putting together the whole plan, or even the existence of the group itself, or whether the source came upon the plot by other means.

Bottom line: At first glance this appears to be the right-wing extremist version of the sort of al-Qaeda wannabe stings we’ve become so familiar with.

A proponent of the war on terror was left with egg on his face during a recent C-Span appearance when caller after caller hammered home the fact that the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was allowed to board Delta flight 253 by the U.S. government.

I’ll give hats off to CSpan. It’s hard to detect any spin in their coverage, except somewhat in their choice of guests and presentations, but when they give face time to libertarians and conservatives they are polite about it and seem to let them have their say.

I think though on occasion one or another of their hosts might tend to cut off uncomfortable callers a little bit quicker than others. I was “kind of” cut off by one, once, because he immediately apologized. It was to the topic, and I mentioned that the Fed was sending money around to institutions that no American would agree to, like the trillions they poured into European central banks and other private banks and selected corporations, that nobody would know about if not for Ron Paul’s pushing for the Fed audit.

Kids say the darndest things. Speaking to a college journalism class last week, I learned the students had recently seen the All The President’s Men, the film noir tale of the Washington Post’s pursuit of the Watergate scandal. When I asked what they thought of it, one young woman said she was pretty surprised by that Deep Throat fellow, the mysterious Post secret super source who skulked about darkened parking garages for pre-dawn meetings. “I thought it was kind of amazing that they just believed anything he told them,” she told me with a quizzical look that suggested I would be able to explain it.

But I couldn’t. I’ve never been able to understand the blind faith of Bob Woodward and his editors in Deep Throat, their amazing insistence that he could be trusted in every detail because his only motive for revealing secrets was his love of truth, justice and the American way. And I understand it considerably less now that I’ve read an advance copy of a book by historian Max Holland to be published next month by the University Press of Kansas, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat.

There is a psychology about Holocaust Studies that is fixated so exclusively on Jews that even the authors of this study did not even think about including it.

They manifest their own version of this error in a slight wave of the hand toward the end of the article:

It actually doesn’t seem very complicated. While there has been a resurgence of Jewish communities in some German cities, the Jews are still alien beings to most Germans. Help people feel the presence of those who once lived among them, reduce the “Otherness” of the Jews — as well as Roma, gay men and lesbians, and other Nazi victims — and the systematic machinery of extermination becomes an affront to everyone.

Note that even the paragraph that mentions all the other victims of Nazi brutality makes them afterthoughts deserving of just incidental mention.

Therein lies that grandiose error of not just all the Holocaust studies that I have seen, but in Hollywood World War Two movies, and even all the multitude of studies about “anti-Antisemitism” in general.

The evil of groups of people attacking other groups is not limited to one group!

In World War Two it was not limited to Jews, either!

We are taught that there were just as many NON-Jews who were massacred in Nazi Germany as there were Jews.

The author mentions “Gypsies, homosexuals, and other Nazi victims” and fails to enumerate those “other Nazi victims”, and that is a BIG OMISSION!

The FIRST Nazi victims were the handicapped, Hitler’s “useless eaters”. Forgotten in that list is also the fact that the homosexuals of the Brownshirts were even used in extreme violence during the 1930s before Hitler allowed the military to eliminate them as a rival armed power.

Sure, Hitler got the Germans fixated mostly on the Jews but it wasn’t just the Jews, it included non-Aryans, non-Germanics, non-Nordics. “Everybody else”.

And not just racial types either. The general population is now just discovering that the SS was an occult organization and its official ceremonies were pagan flashbacks to ancient Teutonic religions.

The fixation on the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust does a great disservice to both history and to Jews themselves.

For Jews, because it misses one important lesson. This narrative provides an immunization against realizing that Jews themselves, or that some Jews, can also fall victim to the same malady of “anti-Semitism”, that is, despising “otherness”, or even the idea that the lesson cannot be applied to Jews or Israelis as brutalizers.

This leads to a psychosis of sorts that feeds a need to label extreme criticisms of Israeli policy, for example, as “psychosis” itself, and a need to justify Zionism as if its principles were not subject to question at all.

The fact that the most devout among Jews are among the ones who question militant Zionism, or question the “Jewishness” of the state of Israel, is testimony that all such issues are not so clearly defined, and using terms like “Jew flu” only help preserve the confusion in the minds of the victims of the popular “Holocaust” mentality.

The author lamented that his unquestionably devout and Kosher Jewish friends tend to treat lightly the brutal crimes against Israelis by Palestinians.

What he misses is the opportunity for the lessons of the Holocaust that would lead to equally serious outcry against Jewish participation, or complicity, in atrocities like Sabra and Shatila, or consideration of the history of Deir Yassin, obliterated in an Irgun and Stern Gang operation.

Those were incidents worthy of a Nuremberg-like trial, mass murders of civilians, women, children, and unarmed men, and in the case of Deir Yassin, a town that had been friendly to Jews that had declared neutrality in the battles between Jews and Arabs of 1948.

Fixation of the Jewish lessons of the Holocaust miss not only the equal importance for the non-Jewish victims of Hitler’s Nazis, but tend to make light of atrocities perpetrated against other victims for their ethnicity or race or religion, and distort discussions of matters Jewish.

The biggest lesson of the Holocaust is to watch for the signs that in 1930s Germany led up to the massacres, and the lessons we learn from other genocides of recent centuries.

The Armenians in Turkey, some villagers in Bosnia, and millions of Christians in Soviet Russia and in Mao’s China are also examples of brutal mass murders that deserve attention.

Let us remember also that the historical brutalities committed in Europe against Jews were also inflicted upon Christians, and sometimes with more ferocity. Bible-believing Christians who protested the hierarchy were burned at the stake possibly in greater numbers than the Jews were over the centuries.

Blaming Christians for “the Holocaust” is a mistake akin to blaming Jews for something they have nothing to do with. It was two nations that were still culturally and spiritually Christian who gave their own lives by the millions to stop the madness, it wasn’t just Schindler and the neglected heroes like Bonhoeffer of the Christian clergy who denounced the evils of the day.

And one last thought.

The fixation in the United States with the need to support Israel is an example of how this kind of thing may be actually harmful to the interests of Israel.

The United States has provided twice or three times as much aid in the Middle East to Israel’s enemies as it does to Israel itself, and the aid to Israel also stunts their own self-defense capabilities because there are always understandings and strings that come along with such aid. Israel not only is capable of building its own impressive nuclear arsenal, but could build its own aircraft, but instead purchases American-made jets and armaments.

The aid to surrounding hostile nations is given in the hope of helping them exercise restraint, but is also used for military acquisitions by countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.